2018 Midterm Elections

Don’t Expect the Midterms to Humble Donald Trump

Republican strategists warn that Trump is sacrificing the House to preserve a Senate majority that was never in doubt. Trump doesn’t seem to care—and is already preparing a 2020 message that posits him as savior.

“Heading into a bad cycle, a politician’s most powerful instinct is to point to somebody else,” former White House press secretary Ari Fleischerobserved last week, summarizing the upcoming midterm elections, in which Democrats are expected to retake the House and launch a campaign of terror against Donald Trump. If Republicans prevail, Fleischer added, “they’re all gonna be saying, ‘We saw it coming all along.’” But vanishingly few strategists are optimistic about their chances, if the pre-election spin cycle is any indication.

G.O.P. insiders have predicted a 2018 bloodbath since last year, given Trump’s extraordinarily low approval rating and the historical tendency of midterm voters to boost whichever party is out of power. The polls tightened after the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle, which energized the conservative base, but Trump traded newfound goodwill among moderates for base activation with his frenzied, racially charged attacks on immigrants. “Trump has hijacked the election,” a senior Republican House aide told Politico on Sunday, referring to the president’s obsession with making the midterm a referendum on the caravan. “This is not what we expected the final weeks of the election to focus on.”

The immigration issue may indeed fire up some portion of conservatives in rural red states, especially in Senate races that might otherwise have been a toss-up. But over in the House, Republicans fear that Trump’s racially tinged closing argument has alienated suburban swing voters and distracted from a booming economy and record-low unemployment rate:

Indeed, some House Republicans say privately that they feel abandoned, as if Trump has given up on them—the likely losers—in order to focus on the Senate. Rubbing salt in the wound, they feel Trump’s message to help Senate Republicans in rural, red states is a direct threat to the House G.O.P.’s cause in suburban areas.

“His honing in on this message is going to cost us seats,” said one senior House G.O.P. campaign source. “The people we need to win in these swing districts that will determine the majority, it’s not the Trump base; it’s suburban women, or people who voted for [Hillary] Clinton or people who are not hard Trump voters.”

Trump doesn’t seem to care. On a phone call Sunday, Politico reports, retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan made a final entreaty for the president to focus his energies on economic issues, such as last year’s tax cut, which have juiced financial markets. But Trump countered that immigration would do more to fire up the base. As he explained publicly during a recent rally in Florida—one of a dozen campaign stops he has made over the past weeks—he wants voters to make their decision with one thing in mind: the caravan. “We can talk about the economy, but the fact is, we know how well we’re doing with the economy and we have to solve problems,” Trump said Friday. At another rally, on Wednesday, he specifically singled out the Washington conventional wisdom about suburban women as a myth: “I don’t view suburban districts or any other districts, I view the country,” he said. “Our country has to be safe. And by the way, women, we’re doing very well with the women vote because they want security, they want safety.”

Congress and the White House are not only squaring off over the efficacy of this message, but also jockeying to avoid blame if it fails. In an interview with the Associates Press last month, Trump waved away the argument that his presence on the campaign trail might hurt some Republicans down-ticket. “No, I think I’m helping people,” he said. “I don’t believe anybody’s ever had this kind of an impact.” But he also seemed to anticipate the possibility that his voters wouldn’t turn out. “I mean, there are many people that have said to me . . . ‘I will never ever go and vote in the midterms because you’re not running and I don’t think you like Congress,’” he explained. Plenty of Republicans involved in the House re-election effort object to that logic. A G.O.P. operative working with congressional races around the country told Axios, “the president, him being undisciplined, and his low approval” will be responsible if the election shakes out as predicted.

Both sides may ultimately have to be content with “saving” the Senate, regardless of whether the president’s strategy is boosting the upper chamber at the expense of the House. Matt Schlapp, who has a reliable conduit to the West Wing press shop thanks to his wife, White House Strategic Communications Director Mercedes Schlapp, offered a variant of this talking point on Friday, telling Politico, “If the president picks up Senate seats, they’ll be no honest people talking about a ‘blue wave.’” G.O.P. consultant Brad Todd made a similar argument, tuned to 2020: “A Republican gain in the Senate is a rebuke of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker.” Another party insider, Barry Bennett, who served as an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, predicted that if Republicans hold the Senate, “that’s all they’ll talk about.”

Of course, Republicans had the advantage in the Senate from the get-go, given that that 26 of the 35 seats up for election are held by Democrats. Trump surely understands that, but his political superpower isn’t modesty. “No matter what happens tomorrow, the president will find a datapoint—or datapoints—to declare victory,” writesJake Sherman, relaying what Republicans say they fear about Tuesday. In other words, there will be no moment of reckoning, such as Obama experienced in 2010. If the House falls, Trump will point the finger at the Ryan and the lower chamber for not keeping the faith, take credit for an inevitable outcome in the Senate, and press forward into 2020 with a new argument—and the same mandate.